Elegy for a Library
Amidst the discomfort and strangeness that has become our every day, I sort of hate to write something melancholy, but I wrote the title to this post over two weeks ago after a trip to our public library and it’s still on my heart. Turns out that trip was to be our last visit to the library for an undetermined amount of time, and that makes this even sadder to me somehow. My earliest clear memory of a library is of the one in my elementary school, Southwood Valley Elementary. Posters of award-winning books decorated the walls, tables were in the middle of the stacks for classes to sit at during instruction. There was this awesome loft you got to by climbing a ladder. Up there, I remember brightly colored floor cushions and wooden racks of Highlights Magazine. Besides coming here with my class to check out books, we sometimes had instruction from the librarian. This was the first place I learned about Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and his fruitless search for the Seven Cities of Gold. I...